SciPy 2015 (Scientific Computing with Python) is coming up in Austin, TX this July 6-12. I attended SciPy last year for the first time to present on scikit-bio (see my talk here), and thought it was an excellent meeting. It was great to spend a week talking about software and software development, which isn’t the focus of most of the meetings that I attend. The conference is broken down into two days of tutorials (6-7 July), followed by the general meeting (8-10 July), and finally a weekend of code sprints/hackathons (11-12 July), so provides a lot of different ways to geek out over python and scientific computing.

This year I’m co-chair of the Computational Life and Medical Sciences mini-symposium with Tracy Teal, a session that will be highly relevant to python bioinformatics developers and users. The call for abstracts for talks and posters is currently open, with a deadline of April 1. This meeting is a great opportunity to present tools that you’re working on and get feedback from a community of python scientific computing software developers. It’s also a chance to meet people working in different domains but who often have similar problems, such as supporting reproducible science, scaling algorithms to big data, and visualizing complex data sets. Plus, Austin is incredibly fun to visit (even in July)!

Given the amount of software that is being developed for studying the microbiology of the built environment, it would be great to see some of the core developers in this community sharing ideas with developers in other areas of bioinformatics and more general scientific computing. Last year, I was struck by how similar the problems were across domains. I learned about several new tools for the first time, and discussions I had at the meeting shaped how my lab has been developing software in the last year.

So if you’re working on python bioinformatics tools, this will be a great meeting for you and I strongly encourage you to submit an abstract. If you have any questions, feel free to get in touch with Tracy or I (our contact information is easy to find).